THE SUBLIME HORSE

Meet American Sculptor Deborah Butterfield - a short video

TRANSCRIPT:

My experience of the sculpture of Deborah Butterfield is that of entering a sacred space where I am drawn in as much by what’s there as by what’s not, the negative space which and I quote allows you to crawl in there…and find some kind of silence.” Imposing and lyrical, static and kinetic these contradictions are baked into the work with the artist going so far as to say these are not really horses at all. 

Deborah Butterfield was born in 1949 in San Diego, California the same day Ponder won the Kentucky Derby and she describes her first experience of seeing a horse as being moved in a non rational, passionate way before she had the words to describe it saying, “It was like I had a horse-shaped hole in my vision and it clicked.”

Throughout her childhood, Butterfield was teased, quite brutally, for drawing horses and by high school she’d sworn off including them in her art, but later as a grad student in ceramic sculpture at UC Davis studying under the likes of Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri and Roy De Forest she got a job on a horse farm, eventually began riding and, as she didn’t yet have the guts to do the horse, her words, she began sculpting clay saddles, the liminal space between horse and rider. “The year was 1973 and artists were making big conceptual pieces. Finally,” Butterfield says, “I just had to give in. To make horses was so dopey it was cutting edge.” With the Vietnam draft underway and a desire to protest, Butterfield gave herself permission to go into the studio saying, “Maybe what I do there will end up influencing people.”

Historically, equestrian art was depicted as the war horse—those who had the horse won the battle. In contrast, Butterfield’s first sculpture—a full-size ceramic mare, tame, unbridled—turned the trope of male domination on its head. It was a metaphorical self-portrait, a feminist response to aggression.

While giving a talk in Lexington, Kentucky she had an opportunity to see Secretariat, the most valuable horse in the world…and he was covered in mud. After that encounter Butterfield went into her backyard and dug up dirt, leaves, grass and twigs, mixed it all together with plaster and glue and covered the metal armature. A piece from this new series was included in the 1979 Whitney Biennial and her career took off.

The final evolution of Butterfield’s aesthetic came while clearing old fence material from her ranch in Montana. Instead of throwing it out, she incorporated it into her work and found the resulting open armature captivating as an end in itself. Covering, as she says, “was like frosting on a perfectly fabulous pound cake that didn’t really need it and so I just started going bare.” And for the past 40+ years she’s been doing just that.

Butterfield describes her work as an abstract activity. “It’s very not a horse,” she says. “It’s this rectangle on four legs and only towards the end when I add a neck and head, all of a sudden it becomes personified.” Imposing and lyrical, static and kinetic, horse not horse.

In 1988 in response to a request by the Walker Art Center to place her sculpture outside, Butterfield began working with the renowned Walla Walla Foundry in Washington state where she casts her work in bronze extending the life of her art for centuries. The result is an astounding facsimile so close to the original I wanted to touch it to make sure it wasn’t wood. Butterfield likens the foundry to quote, “a chocolate factory for artists where pretty much anything you can think of can be made.”

For the past fifty years Butterfield’s subject matter has remained constant while her exploration of materials is unceasing. Clay, sticks, mud, crushed heating ducts, tsunami and earthquake debris, scrap metal, barbed wire, whale bone…the list goes on. And that’s what I find remarkable, through exquisite composition Butterfield transforms the mundane into a profound emotional experience, in other words great art.

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Youtube and Medium: @LauriebFrankel